The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead

by Carl Watkins

‘This is a wonderful curious and insightful’ Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England

We know what happens to the body when we die, but what happens to the soul? The answer may remain a great unknown, but the question has shaped centuries of tradition, folklore and religious belief.

In this vivid history of the macabre, Carl Watkins goes in search of the ancient customs, local characters and compelling tales that illuminate how people over the years have come to terms with our ultimate fate. The result is an enthralling journey into Britain’s past, from medieval hauntings on the Yorkshire moors and eccentric memorials on the Cornish coast to séances in Victorian kitchens and gallows tales from a Bristol gaol. Impeccably researched and elegantly told, The Undiscovered Country ventures beyond the veil to bring the dead back to life.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Death, Folklore, Historical, Ghost Stories, Anthropology

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

A specialist in religious culture in the central and later Middle Ages, Carl Watkins is Reader in History at the University of Cambridge.

Reviews

[Diego · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very slow read for me. Only enjoyed some bits. Quite boring in othet places.

[Terri Stokes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone thinks about death at some point in their lives, maybe multiply times over the years. Most of the time it's, how are they going to die, or when are they going to die. But not a lot of people really question, what happens after we die?

Carl Watkins takes us on a journey through time, detailing different thoughts and belief's of the different eras through life, the customs that comes with death and even the folklore behind others. We go from one end of the country to the other following after different subjects from ghosts to burial rites and wants. We follow along with religious belief's in the rights and wrongs of a body, upon how many believe in the dead being buried rightly by god, touching upon cremation and even the aspect of those who don't believe in god.

It's certainly a book that I'm glad I happened upon and added to my collection. I fully enjoyed reading through the thoughts and stories that Watkins collected to write this book and it's one I will cherish and read again in the future sometime.

[Adam Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A perfect companion to the festive season. Carl Watkins is a captivating historical tour guide for the afterlife c. 1400-1920. He offers a series of local narratives that illustrate larger trends in British attitudes towards the dead, as well as describing individual eccentricities in the quest to be remembered on earth and/or blessed in heaven. This book will help you to answer questions such as, Should Protestants like a good ghost story? How can you offer a worse legal punishment than execution? Why does a HM Revenue and Customs officer make a quinquennial trek up a Cornish hill? After reading, I would recommend reading the Bible as a good follow-up with more definite answers to the question: "What next?"

[Icy Sedgwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book, albeit one that occasionally becomes bogged down in an overload of information, backtracking through anecdotes and details that Watkins has already provided. He does tell a few ghost stories, and relates a handful of ancient customs, as promised by the blurb, but my one real gripe is that in places, it becomes less about the attitude towards the dead and more about the belief systems inherent within different strands of Christianity. The discussions around Spiritualism and the growth of a more secular society are fascinating, and clearly no discussion of death rituals would really be complete without reference to religion, but at times the book feels less like an investigation of the way that the living approach the dead, and more a history of British religion between the Reformation and the First World War. That said, it is interesting and his chronological approach makes it easy to see the differences unfold, even if he does sometimes repeat himself or spend paragraphs obsessing over minute and often irrelevant details.

[Amy W · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was overall interesting, if a little too detailed at times. The chapters would have more impact if they were shorter and punchier as they repeated themselves a bit e.g. having many different examples, but all actually saying the same thing in a round-about way.

I think the book goes roughly in chronological order by chapter, though it did seem to jump around a bit which was confusing. My favourite chapters were those on cremation and the final chapter on the WWI war dead.

This is evidently a well-researched book and there are some interesting facts to be found in it.

[Stephen Makin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book you should read if you provide end of life care, EOL being the modern euphemism for the deathbed. It's not about death, but about what the living have believed about death through the ages.

It's made me think about the modern rituals of death, the ones so ubiquitous we don't see them as rituals.

[Steve]

Iain Sinclair on The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead by Carl Watkins:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/...

[Siri Olsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Undiscovered Country explores perceptions of death and ideas of afterlife, heaven and hell in England from the beginning of the Tudor period until the First World War, showing the interconnections between beliefs about mortality and the greater religious and societal transformations over the past five centuries. I found the book very engaging and well-written, and the research behind it is frankly astonishing. My one criticism is that each chapter places a lot of emphasis on just one or a few casestudies. The casestudies are well-chosen to illustrate the central ideas of each age, but I would perhaps have wanted some more general descriptions of the big changes in beliefs. That said, the book is a great read for anyone with an interest in the more macabre sides of history, beliefs about the afterlife, and the connections between mortality and society in England from the end of the Middle Ages to the First World War.

[Annette Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly entertertaining, interesting and informative book about beliefs about death, or rather what happens to us after death, between 1400's and 1900's in Britain. As we're taken through the ages and changes in beliefs the author weaves the information into stories about real people and places with such a chatty, witty stlye it's easy to read even though it's quite an academic piece of research by a Cambridge historian. Recommended for anyone who's ever wondered about an afterlife or lack of one.

[Ellie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an incredibly frustrating book. Whilst there are some fascinating stories included, it is very repetitive and has no clear structure aside from a vague chronology. It also starts arbitrarily in the 15th century - some clarification on this would have been helpful, especially when there are so many interesting things to discuss about earlier medieval practices related to death.

[Ken Sampson · Rating 4 out of 5]

[2015] An unusual book about the human soul and the concept of death throughout the ages. It is a well written, engaging and informative book. Essentially it outlines the concept of the soul - what happens to it, or to us, when we die. The author starts with the early modern period and takes us to various places around the country and explores how various people saw death when it came close, how they prepared for it and safeguarded themselves. Loads of detailed research and thought provoking information drawn from a wide variety of sources. My only criticism is that it would have been interesting to have gone back further in time and to have included other parts of the United Kingdom. I enjoyed it and would recommend it.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The difference between 'Do you believe in Ghosts', 'Do ghosts exist' and 'Do you know any ghost stories'?

Watkins tracks the changes in people's beliefs death from the Middle Ages to the end of the first world war. He does this not by focussing on the official theological versions, but by searching out specific anecdotes evetns and stories which he presents as representative.

So the stories he tells are those of people's wills, their burial practices, specific sermons and diary entries, famous ghost stories and now forgotten spiritualists. And he localises his stories geographically, often beginning each section by describing the landscape in which the story is set.

It's a fascinating book. He writes well, and his method allows him to illuminate the differences between what the church or the priest or the latest theology said people should believe, and what they actually believed reflected in their own words and actions. He gently illuminates the contradictions.

It's a fascinating book.

[Santiago Bartivas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Packed full of anecdotes from 600 years of death in the British Isles, I wondered whether it might be a bit morbid or grim (not necessarily a problem, of course) but far from it. This was a fun read, full of wit, humour and insight.


The way death rituals and folklore have changed, rather unsurprisingly, with the religious upheavals in the country, with the fraught switch away from Catholicism particularly important, was a fascinating study. The changing nature of ghosts and the refusal of such a belief to die, pardon the pun, was also well worth the price of admission.

Given the rich source of anecdotes it provides, this could be of interest to storytellers and folklorists as well as the general reader, and makes a good companion read to Religion and the Decline of Magic which covers similar shifts of belief following the split with the Catholic church.

At times it did very much feel like an exploration of a hidden area, and perhaps a bit more of a through-line or argument might have made it a true treasure. Nevertheless, thoroughly engrossing and I can imagine poring through it again in the future. It shall, rather ironically, have a long and happy life on my bookshelf.

[Justine · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is so much information in this book, which was a bit tedious at times, but the author presented it with such clear order that it was very easy to follow the details from his clearly exhaustive research. The end of the book was a little slow, and entire sections were almost verbatim repeats of earlier ones, particularly when he discussed the transition from hellfire-preaching evangelicism to a more spiritual materialism-influenced interpretation of the Bible's post-mortem conjectures. I think my favorite part of this book was the tangible historical information: political figures & dates, the fathers of the "Ghost Story" genre, the social evolution of radical agnosticism, &c -- I now have a long list of further reading to do!

[Anwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear, concise meander amongst the customs and rituals of death from the Medieval period to the Great War. Although familiar with many of the subjects discussed (the Tedworth Drummer, spiritualism, secularism), there was much here that was new and of interest to me, particularly the discussions on purgatory and on masses for souls, and also the way the Protestant Reformation left ghosts adrift, without context or home. Although the constraints of space mean that the subjects dealt with are discussed only briefly, this is a fantastic first stop for those new to this world, and a valuable addition to their collection to those who are already comfortable in its midst. Also included are colour plates of some of the people and items mentioned in thr text.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to admit to having a macabre interest in death.... in attitudes the living have adopted to deal with this ultimate, unavoidable fate specifically. So much so that when I was at university my final year dissertation was based on a study of changes in attitudes over the last millennium. As such I found this book fascinating from start to finish. Francis Bacon said that 'Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark' and this is a point that this book makes clearly. It studies the way the living have confronted this fear, and have reassured themselves about the uncertainty of the afterlife. Such a fascinating subject, and a well written insightful book.

[Elizabeth Judd Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book looks at English beliefs surrounding death from the late Middle Ages through to the end of World War I. From ghost stories and lore to religious upheaval to scientific discoveries to spiritualism, many varied topics are covered. This could be morbid and/or dry, but the author looks at these topics through the eyes of people who lived through all the different ages and who left enough of a record for us to get to know them as actual people, not just someone who died long ago. We learn about monks and merchants and soldiers and more, and we come to understand how religion, social structure, and geography all come to play a part in how people look at death. Highly recommended.

[Louise Armstrong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Glanville apparently said that the spirit world was not a well discovered region, but rather an unknown territory whose contours needed mapping. I agree. Why don't we spend more time mapping them?

I enjoyed the first part of this book, where the author discussed what medieval people believed, but then the book became more a collection of stories and less of a discussion. Maybe it's harder to get a handle on what we still partially believe?

Amused to find that many of the things I was taught in my convent have not been believed for centuries!

[Wilde Sky · Rating 3 out of 5]

A review of ancient customs related to death.

This was a weird book, I’m really sure what points it was trying to make. The writing was repetitive and it could have been done with being shorter – it would probably work better as a spoken piece.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting insight into attitudes to death, dying and bereavement throughout the ages. Faith and folklore are treated with equal respect.

[Rheeanne75 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whatever the faults of this book, they are over shadowed by the eloquence of the second to last chapter about death and World War I.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starting from the medieval era, Watkins looks at changing attitudes and beliefs towards death, dying and the afterlife. This well-written book presents some interesting viewpoints.